Pitchfork

On Dogs, Nina Nastasia sings about dogs, as a symbol of the pursuit of love, or a metaphor for the easy life, but also as a colloquialism-- "your dogs are tired," on "The Long Walk"-- or to set up, by way of the cat/dog dichotomy, a clever pun, when Nastasia admits that "curiosity kills me." She also makes a musical pun when the cello quotes the "give a dog a bone" line of "This Old Man". Nastasia doesn't fixate on the animal as a formal concept for the record-- it's more like a recurring gag. Dogs pass through as easily as the fleeting smokes, or the beers that she and her friends half-heartedly throw back outside the high school, or an unsurprising string of bad relationships.

With its snarky cover shot and the salutation ("Thank you, comrades") on the back sleeve, Dogs seems more light-hearted and somehow "younger" than Nastasia's other records, and for good reason: She recorded it five years ago, and is now re-releasing it for the fans she gained with The Blackened Air and Run to Ruin. In her work since, she's honed an elusively grim atmosphere, and her albums are stronger for it-- not because they need moodiness to prop them up, but because the moods draw out the nuances of her frank but graceful songs. On Dogs, she sounds more like a standard singer/songwriter, and it's hard not to treat this as a prelude to her better albums.

Nastasia has an understated voice with a limited range, and on several of these ballads, you can hear her drift into its limits, accepting a whispering tone as the cost of expressiveness; on her later albums, she sings more confidently, or lowers her voice to a warning. The arrangements on Dogs are also a simpler precursor of The Blackened Air, where the strings and saws drift in on an autumnal gust, or the striking textures of Run to Ruin.

Steve Albini, who has engineered all of her albums, plays the part of creating an objective as-is document, but he and Nastasia have a good idea as to where to put the focus. The recording makes impressive use of vintage instruments, whose birthdates and makers are detailed in the liner notes. (Who knew that Nastasia was a socialist and a gearhead?) The strings augment Nastasia's ballads without sweetening them, and Stephen Day's cello smoothly complements her voice. But the delicate arrangements hold back louder songs like "Nobody Knew Her", on which a surprisingly powerful guitar deserves more room.

Nastasia has said she practices in the bathroom of her apartment, and Dogs has the ease of a performance that you're catching as you sit in the shower stall. The songs here include some of the best she's written, but they're also some of the most unexpected. Without this reissue, we could have forgotten that she has an ear for big guitar riffs, or that she sounds beautiful just playing straight on an acoustic guitar. And who would have remembered that she has a sense of humor?